Background: Failure to rescue has been recognized as an important indicator of quality in cardiac surgery.It is considered by the agency for research and quality in health care as one of the twenty indicators of safety for the patient in a hospital institution.It is a proportion in which the numerator is equal to the number of deaths during hospitalization for surgery, and the denominator is equal to the number of patients with at least one complication in which the ability of an institution to prevent mortality in patients who have suffered complications is considered.Objective: To characterize the rescue failure in a sample collected during 8 years in a Colombian institution of Cardiovascular surgery.Methods: Observational, cross-sectional study, with retrospective collection of information, with a record of 976 patients who underwent cardiovascular surgery in the period between April 2009 and December 2017; The complications of interest analyzed and developed by the patients during the postoperative period were: Cerebrovascular Disease (CVD), acute renal failure, prolonged mechanical ventilation (greater than 48 hours) and postoperative bleeding.Results: 15.08% (129) of the patients presented one of the complications analyzed in the study, of which 22 died, for a rescue failure of 17%.Conclusions: The results obtained in our research are not far from those achieved worldwide and although they indicate that we are on the right path, they also show us that there is still much to improve.